I’d like to regale you with tales of online capers and illicit shenanigans, the operative words here being “like” and “to.” Did I say Grand Theft Auto Online was a little rough right now? “A little rough,” you know, “mostly unplayable” — what’s the difference?

I’ve been trying to get into a live GTA Online session all afternoon, but I keep running up against the message “Alert: Failed to host a GTA Online session. Please return to Grand Theft Auto V and try again later.” The only option after this message is to tap “X” to continue, prompting the game to pull up above the clouds, zoom sideways over Los Santos Person of Interest-style, then zoom back down to the last Grand Theft Auto V character I was playing. There’s no way to skip that sequence, which is probably Rockstar’s way of saying “Sorry, bub. No hammering the servers, capisce?”

If I try to drop into a solo session, an option that’ll let you play GTA Online alone with no one else allowed to join and your available activities curtailed, I’ve been able to see the introductory cutscene, but as soon as my character walks across a parking lot to cue the starter racing mission, the game displays “Alert: Failed to join Job or Activity. Return to GTA Online,” followed by “Alert: There has been an error joining a session. Please return to Grand Theft Auto V,” followed by that “is-it-mocking-me?” continue button.

So in short, I can’t play. I’ve been able to roll a character outside the game, but joining at this point’s a bust. I’ll of course keep trying.

Rockstar warned things could be rough last week, reiterating in its GTA Online update last night that “you should expect that there will be some technical teething issues in the early days of a new online experience especially one as massive as GTA Online.” The company’s maintaining a status update page here that runs through some of the error messages, though that’s all it is at this point — an error repository. There’s no advice on what to do, doubtless because there’s nothing you can do until Rockstar tweaks its servers and the play request tsunami settles down.

There may (and I repeat may) be an upside to all this congestion: I have no idea if character names are global (one instance only for all) or local (infinite instances), but if they’re the former, I just scored big with “Sharknado.” How is that not winning?

why didn't they just allow a certain number of people to go online, have everyone else wait, then the next group of people could go online to calm down the server load. sure it's unfair, but no more unfair then just about everybody not being able to get on..

It's the lack of servers causing the issues. I finally figured out how to get it to work. Create a new/second character online (not that you'll lose any progress since you're stuck anyway). You'll have to sit through the intro cut-scene stuff again. When it gets to the part where it "never loads," literally do nothing. The server issues are creating immense queue times. It will eventually go through. Mine took about 12 minutes (real-life time lol) to get going. Race works fine now. No lag. Everything is perfectly smooth and I'm totally online now and rank 3 :)

talk about dropping the damm ball.....rockstar had HOW LONG to "tweak their servers"? considering the massive s***storms that both "diablo 3" and "the sims" created on their launch, you'd THINK they'd better prepare.

it's a damm good thing this is for free. first they limit the amount of heists we can do for the story mode, than this mickey mouse bull****?? **** you, rockstar......we made you guys billionaires, now earn your money.

No matter what Rockstar says, they dropped the ball hard here. I will reference Trion's Defiance. A fun, action-packed game with incredible amounts of bugs and technical issues. Except, Defiance works, and is still fun. GTA Online, doesn't even work. I'm sorry but they should have expected millions of players to jump on Day One, and they had an extra two weeks to at least sort out a few of the smaller issues. Well, goodbye Rockstar, and back to Defiance

"There’s no way to skip that sequence, which is probably Rockstar’s way of saying “Sorry, bub. No hammering the servers, capisce?”" - Or there way of saying, "We unloaded the state you were in and it will take a moment to reload the area you were just in." But yes, they probably could have waited and made sure you got logged in before losing your state.

(Australia, Xbox Live) After three hours, I managed to get to the "Last Man Standing" bit. This was following issues with the race trigger not showing up for an hour or so, the drug recovery mission glitching and resetting three times, my character refusing to go into passive mode and losing my HUD and start menu access twice.

Apparently, after beating the "Last Man Standing" bit, it's plain sailing. But I didn't manage to get past that since it kicked me out the first time and on the second try just hung at "Loading" for 35 minutes. It'll settle down eventually, but it's rather frustrating.

Also, I apparently got the world record at the racing mission, which I highly doubt.

Based on what I've seen on the Gamefaqs XBOX 360 and PS3 forums for Grand Theft Auto 5, the problem seems to be much worse for PSN users. Xbox users have been consistently reporting some success since this morning at launch. The PS3 forums are a dismal sight to behold. The most success I've seen from anybody on there has been getting passed that first driving mission on solo mode.

same stuff has happened to me I was able to create my character but same messages has poped up for me all I wanna do is play with my own character n crew that I creates pleaes email me asap on further informantion like how lond do you think its going to be like this?? a month? just a few days

@my_big_thang well you just answered your own question: it's unfair. No one wants to be in that group of people told they can't play. It's best to just let random ppl through based on luck of the draw until the issues are resolved.

@joevel80 that's not the way preparing servers works. sure, there's things to be learned from games like Diablo 3 and SimCity and the like, but nothing can prepare servers for tens of millions of players trying to access online at the same time. Especially with an open-world game as large and detailed as this. There's nothing to it but to do it, as they say. So cool your jets. They'll have it working in a week and you'll be back to rightly calling this the best game ever...

@ClintonWeir My gripe, spelled out more completely here, is that they won't let you re-attempt to log back into GTA Online without *first* returning you to GTA V. So you're forcibly ejected from GTA Online, forced to wait until GTA V loads, then have to re-load GTA Online to try to access it again.

@mar23kmr i was just playing for a few hours, no problems other than in the first two missions, nothing that going to the xbox dashboard and back into the game couldn't fix, after i finished those two missions it was smooth sailiing